Welcome to The Innovation Today podcast where we speak with today's technology leaders about how they're innovating to stay ahead of changing industry Dynamics and reaching new levels of productivity and automation brought to you by service now your partner in digital transformation thank you for joining us today for another episode of The Innovation Today podcast I'm your host Jim vanber field Innovation officer at service now today I'm excited to welcome Andrew vanwagner a practice lead at KPMG and I'm told a service now certified Master architect welcome Andrew yeah thanks thanks for having me absolutely so I'm so ha I'm I'm really excited to talk to you today even though we're talking about operational resilience our last conversation about it actually got me excited about it so before we get into it can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your role sure yeah yeah so thanks again for for having me so Andrew vanwagner I have been with KPMG for 6 years and I've been working with service now though for 10 plus so a long time with the platform I've been with the UK firm so I'm located in London I lead the Amia practice for service now but I've been kind of classically what I've been doing recently I've been been growing the UK practice and working on building the architecture capability there and you know me in the Amia role is basically taking that framework that model good practice and maturing all the other countries in Amia making sure that we have the right solutions to to deliver to customers and maturity and have really robust practices and collaboration amongst all the countries as well so that's that's kind of what I'm up to now but also when it comes to resilience I've been working with clients in the UK in the resilience space and I've been helping to kind of lead our team that our our tiger team that's kind of working with clients in the space of Dora and resilience across Amia as well so it's kind of not not a hobby but it's something that uh it's been a passion for me working with clients around resilience and making sure that we kind of roll that out and work with all of our clients across am Mia as well that's fantastic I love it so you're you're busy and then you make yourself busier yeah indeed indeed indeed that's Fant okay so uh today we're going to talk about operational resilience if you don't mind yeah so let's start uh with how you Define operational resilience because I I think there might some different definitions but as a subject matter expert how would you define operational resilience I mean resilience is is an interesting topic um you know at the end of the day it's about making sure that you're doing the best for your customers as an organization and ultimately from a resilience point of view it's making sure that every Motion in your organization every part of your organization and everything you're doing every service that that you're offering or product that you're offering your customers that resilience is at the heart of everything that you do and you're you're ultimately reducing harm with your customer base and you're making sure that from a resilience play that you know that you're really thinking first about how can we do things in a consistent Manner and making sure that all of all of our services all of our products are in a position that they're available to customers when we say that they're going to be and that they're available in the way that we intend them to be as well yeah that's that's it right that's it and would you say also our ability to maintain the continuity the business within the external headwinds as well is that part of yeah for sure for sure so this is this is exciting because you you've flipped the pro the thought process on a lot of how people think about resilience right it's not just I did resilience right I did I this checkbox yeah it's not a checkbox and I think that's you know in some instances in some organizations that's how they have seen it in the past so there's regulation in the UK around resilience there's regulation in the EU called Dora which is all around digital operational resilience but the heart of these regulations they're really just saying you need to make sure that all of your offerings all the products that you offer to your customers are available when you say that they're going to and be available in a way that ultimately serves them in the best way and that you're thinking about the way that you offer things to customers in a way that that you know makes it so that that harm is reduced and you know it started in banking it started in banking in in the UK because Services crashed they were down there were it outages and people couldn't transfer funds and you know in some instances that's you know it might seem like something that you know if it's down for an hour and if you need to to make a payment to somebody it might seem well that's that's all right but the reality with some with some of customers you know if it's something is down for an hour you know that could actually really harm somebody and it could be you know in some instances it can be if it's if you think about services in some Industries it can be ultimately life or death for some people and and what you're providing to them if you think about you know energy and pro providing energy if you're not resilient in all of the the steps of the way that you provide energy to your customer base and you're out for a few hours you know that that that can be life or death so it's it's really making sure that you're you know it's customer first and it's not a tick boox exercise exactly right it's really moving towards embedding and integrating the way that you manage reduce risk and are kind of redundant first and and making sure that everything's available when you when it should be available yeah and and so I want to follow that up with maybe a two-part question it might be a 1.5p part question around the so I think a lot of our listeners understand the problems the the the pitfalls what are the opportunities because you are you're really versed in again how to expand operations as a business opportunity so what are some of those opportunities that I'm missing out on by it a checkbox well if you if you treat it just like a checkbox you know we can you can hire a group of people and you can put them off into a room and they can define a control framework and they can go and look at all the people and processes and start to just say are we doing this are we doing that and from a regulatory point of view that could be enough and you can report it back to the regulator and say okay we we've looked at your resilience regulation and we've said here are the answers to your questions right uh so that's that's one way that you could tackle it but if you actually think about kind of embedding resilience into everything that you do as an organization you actually will start to learn more about the services that you provide your customers and when you get to that position then you can think about you know if if you have a really robust endtoend view of the services that you provide you might not have been in that position originally and when you have that when you have that vision you can then say okay you know we we start to break it down and we see where some of the the challenges are in some of our services and we can think about ways that we can differentiate we can invest more in different parts of the business because we actually know where some of our vulnerabilities might have been and we can maybe say that you know we we think we have a competitive Advantage with a certain service because of the way that we've analyzed it and our resilience posture and we're actually beating our competition in that space so we should maybe start to push something more as a service out into the business you know out out to our customer base as well so I think you know the more that you embed resilience and the more you think Service First the more visibility and awareness that you have around everything you provide and you can start to make some of those strategic decisions and beat your competition in a way that you might not have been able to before because you didn't have a really great end to-end view of the services that you provide and I love that you really you you teed up for the 0. five part of my my question which is what is the business value that companies are experienced outside of that Innovation opportunity what what are the secondary and tertiary benefits that I experience from operational resilience well I mean it it is kind of what I what I just said it's it provides you with if you're really embedding resilience into all parts of the business it provides you with the view of where your strengths are as an organization where your weaknesses are are with your services and it might give you insight into your offerings and and what your competition is doing and what you might want to start to do differently I mean back to the from a a business decision point of view because you know more now you can actually analyze with data more about the services that you provide and you know get to a position where you make some some actual strategic calls in a with with a datadriven view of your organization and the services so what effect does that have on my customer loyalty what effect does that have on my market perception yeah well I think the next step of this is not just it's you're Mo you move beyond the decision and you move beyond the strategy and kind of the maybe the investment position but you can take this and start to talk to your customers about it and say you know be very transparent about the services that you provide and that end to end view of the way that you manage and drive resilience in all of your offerings and say customer this is what we're doing this you know these are all of our safeguards that we have in place so you can actually trust us to always be there when you need us to be there that's that's a differentiator that you can take to Market talk to your customers and say yeah we want to we want to work with you as a bank now I I actually trust you I you have sold me on the way that you manage your offering so I you know you're going to be there I I want to use you and as we've seen particularly in the banking space yeah that is critically important yeah but uh in any business so what are what verticals are you seeing uh a lot of success in recently yeah well I meaner I mean from a regulatory point of view it has been banking first and it's it is financial services first uh but that's because of performance in the past I mean that's because the regulation has kind of been pushed in the financial service space there's a there's a reason for that and it's because of failures and outages right uh so Financial Services obviously obviously first because of the regulatory imperative but we're also talking to clients in other Industries who are very interested in this because if you think about manufacturing and the way that you you provide services and products to your customer base having from an operational technology point of view and and making sure that you have a really good endtoend control of everything that you're offering you know it's it's another place where you can differentiate and have a Services view of of all of your products and when you get to that position then you know you're I guess you're you're really in that same space where you can differentiate and talk to clients talk to your customers about the way that you're you know maybe from a man manufacturer's point of view you're you're in a position to say this is the product this is the way that we control the whole process end to end and it's a quality conversation at the end of the day as well so it's you know outside of je the regulation we're talking to customers who want to do this again back to understanding everything that they're doing and using it as a way to differentiate and make decisions yeah yeah so then can can I press you for a specific example do you have an example in your pocket that you share with us around whether it's it doesn't have to be Finance or banking it can be manufacturing or yeah well one one example a bank that I've worked with in the UK we what we've done they're they're kind of a more advanced customer of resilience and they've been doing resilience for quite some time and something that we've done more recently with them is kind of a strategy around data resilience and we we've taken outside of just kind of the the core offerings that they have we've also really dug into and looked at the lineage of data and the way that it connects to all the service providers that that they work with and all the external organizations and the customers and the way that things flow and you know that that specific example you know it's it's it's quite a complicated kind of network and tapestry of of the way that everything flows but they they actually got to position in in doing this that they they learned a lot more about the services that they provide and they they were kind of in some ways based off of some understandings of some of their core services and they again they had been they had been driving resilience as a program for a number of years but by then focusing just on kind of the the data pillar of resilience they even found you know more more insight into the business more insight into the third parties that they're working with and you know started to to kind of make investment decisions off the back of that off of the Insight that they gained there so it was it was really interesting to to see to see that web as we we built it out and built the strategy around what we do next in the space of resilience after what we learned yeah so on the heels of the importance of data resilience yeah and what do we do next let's talk about the elephant in the room right artificial intelligence sure so data governance is AI govern is successful AI implementation and resilience so can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing today and what we should be thinking about tomorrow yeah I mean I guess if we think about resilience it is it's a journey for a lot of organizations first and foremost as we as we've talked about already it's making sure that you have a great definition of all all the services that you provide and if you think about the way that you start to kind of dig into and and manage and control everything from a risk point of view you you have an ability to learn more about the risk posture of the organization and the services and you know I think from a risk and control point of view you also have an ability to move to towards more Automation in controls and I think if you think I guess from a cyber point of view if you if you think about recovery and the the application of AI you have an ability to spot Trends more inside of the risk the way that you're managing risk identify things that that you might not intuitively have thought about and also from an orchestration point of view you can also do control Automation and Remediation and you know I think to me AI is is very I guess if we think about Ai and the application of AI in the risk space it It ultimately will drive into scenario testing and business continuity more as well and I think it'll put us into a position where we can run more scenarios against our services and actually really dig into and do more more of the wh if scenario and actually you know beyond just you know having that endtoend view really kind of probing everything that we're offering and coming up with opportunities more opportunities for investment decision as the insights we could not possibly have had yeah and it it would you know in the past business continuity was a very manual exercise so it provides a way to do more of that and a much much more rapid fashion as well yeah so as we we get to the end of our time together there's just a few more questions I have for you so where as a as a leave or as a takeaway for our listeners where where do I start if I'm a business owner whether it's my lines of business or I'm a CEO where do I start with regards and I'm going to be specific I'm going to assume that our listeners already have operational resilience in place to some degree so they don't need to know where we start what I I'm specifically asking about is AI and operational resilience where where do we start with that where do we start with AI and operational res I mean I think you need to take a look at kind of your your current posture and to me I AI there's there's a great opportunity again to you to to drive more of the trend side of resilience and and to really analyze the services that you're providing but I think the the place that I would start would actually be kind of a step back to be honest that kind of pre pre AI it's I agree having that having that really robust definition of services and really understanding everything that you provide to customers end to end is is key now a way to drive that and to kind of move the needle on that from a maturity point of view there are are tools at disposal to to to do that in a different F way you know you can map out the services in a more automated f fashion you can kind of understand some of the people and Technology that's involved in the services that's all that's all possible to do so I would I would focus on on that first because I think you know the most benefit that you get out of driving resilience is is knowing more about what your offerings are at the end of the day and then AI is obviously a maturity step that will help you with better Automation in kind of that definition cycle so then I've done all of that what's next what do you what is your crystal ball telling you right now I mean I think the thing that's next and the thing that's interesting from a a European Union point of view is is digital operational resilience and it's all about the kind of the intersect of cyber into the services that you're providing as well so it's kind of moving beyond just the C you know that great understanding of the services that you're providing but then moving into the position of you know outside of just the what if it's do we are we vulnerable you know what are we externally vulnerable what does that what does that look like making sure that outside of just what you're doing what do you have control over what are the external factors that you might not have control over and how can you better anticipate those and provide make sure that your services are are resilient as well so that's to me that's the the real thing that's that's next is making sure that you're kind of looking externally and making sure that all of your services are are truly truly robust that's great thank you so much so this has been an amazing conversation I want to just give you an opportunity is there anything that you want that we haven't talked about that you feel like our listeners would be interested in or any takeaways or leaves that uh that I have probed out of you I don't I don't I don't think so to be honest I mean I mean yeah I mean to me the thing that's important about this is that it there there's a lot to resilience and if you think about you know the breakdown of resilience when it comes to cyber the the Cyber side of it it comes to kind of your core it processes if you think about the way that you manage your third parties that you work with as well you know you're only as strong at the end of the day as your weakest link yep and you know I think it can be quite daunting to think of you know do we actually know everything that we offer do we really know everything that we offer so you know the thing to me as a takeaway is to break it down and make sure that you're kind of looking at this whole process and and thinking about a way that you can embed this more inside of all the activities of the business number one and number two I would think you know from I guess your question about AI think about the way that you can use technology to manage more of this process and do some of this in from a technology point of view in the places where you're managing some of these processes as well and your services that you're providing so I think doing that more and thinking about that and building a maturity model and working with organizations like KPMG where we where we have you know we a large set of clients that we work with and make sure that you're talking to other you know other organizations that are in the same industry as well and and learn more about the way that you can kind of break this up and go on a journey yeah that's a student I really appreciate that advice that's great Andrew thank you so much for joining us today it's been really insightful every time I talk to you I learn something new appreciate it and thank you 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